MachineWorks to bring the latest of Polygonica Software to formnext 2017

Posted by Polygonica | 9 Nov, 2017

This annual exhibition for the additive manufacturing industry will be the setting for Polygonica, MachineWorks’ polygonal modelling toolkit, to be showcased. Polygonica will have onsite demonstrations of its latest release in Hall 3.1, Stand E90, between the 14th and the 18th of November at Messe Frankfurt, Germany.

The recent Polygonica 2.1 release has added significant functionality to support local modelling operations. This includes regional offsetting where individual faces or regions of a part can be offset inwards and outwards along with interactive mesh deformation based on the new boundary-constrained fairing functionality. These sculpting workflows are also enhanced by geodesic/shortest path-selection, regional remeshing and smoothing which improve polygon distribution and surface quality prior to modelling in regions where, for example, blending is required.

Imprinting of 2D profiles and 3D curves supports engraving and embossing of text, logos and decals into parts whilst the new and extremely fast polyline to surface clipping functionality supports a variety of operations including lattice generation for complex shapes and fast rasterization for DLP-type print processes.

Convex decomposition has been added to dramatically improve collision detection performance in dynamic environments such as hybrid AM machines, CMMs and robot workcells. Feature detection has been enhanced to support detection of higher level features including planes, islands, pockets, holes and drilled holes.

Simplification algorithms have been enhanced both to improve performance and further preserve local attributes such as vertex normals. Simplification is used in a variety of worfklows ranging from reducing large STL files based on print tolerance at the start of the print preparation pipeline to facilitating enterprise-based viewing of large assemblies across a range of target devices including cloud, desktop, mobile. The fast simplification and defeaturing options available within Polygonica have a wide range of uses from Virtual and Augmented Reality, 3D PDF publishing and archiving and PLM/PDM through online configuration and quoting, work instructions and remote inspection in disconnected environments.

As opposed to stand-alone solutions, Polygonica is a software development toolkit (SDK) delivered as a set of libraries to be embedded into the customers’ products.

Leading manufacturers used to rely on external software providers to supply their customers with complete out-of-the-box software solutions for healing and print preparation. Polygonica enables OEMs to take control over their own intellectual property and strengthen the relationship with their own customers. Hardware manufacturers are able to provide accurate healing and print preparation capabilities optimised for their machines, improving the production workflow and reducing costs of both time and materials.